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Idiopathic Issues

The Holiday Season is in full swing and I don’t know about you, but it is a struggle for me to make good food choices and find the time to exercise during all of the festivities. Unfortunately for our pets there seems to be a correlation with our Winter weight gain and their Winter weight gain. I had so many Spring Wellness exams that started out with, Fluffy has gained quite a bit of weight over the Winter and we will need to do something about that.

In a way, I feel for the clients. If you live in a cold climate it can be hard to take your dog out for a walk when it is freezing cold or freezing rain. The sidewalks get clogged with ice and snow and it is dark out earlier so it really can be treacherous to take your pup out for a walk. Unfortunately, if you are like me, you feel guilty when you don’t take your dog for a walk so you make up for it by giving treats. Decreased calories out and increased calories in is a dangerous equation for weight gain.

I am the granddaughter of a wildlife rehabilitator. After a career in the military my grandfather, a World War II and Korean War Veteran retired from the Army and joined the US Fisheries and Wildlife Service. He soon became an integral player in the Bald Eagle Reintroduction Project in the state of Maine. To say that I am proud of my grandfather’s accomplishments is an understatement. As a kid I didn’t realize how important his job was, the coolest part about having a grandfather who rescued wildlife was that visiting my grandparents meant checking out all of the cool animals in the barn. He always had an array of birds, transiently living there until they could be returned back to the wild. He had owls, hawks, ospreys, and herons on a constant rotation. Seeing those birds up close and personal was absolutely formative to my early childhood love of animals and planted the seed that I would one day grow up to help animals for a living too. I’ve run into many people over the years, most notably a medical doctor, who sighted concepts like “survival of the fittest” as a reason to not help animals.

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